"The cheapest shop" is a myth — no single shop has the lowest price on everything. One wins on peated Islay, another on bourbons, and a third simply has a broad range at decent prices. The question that really matters is a different one: where does it statistically pay off to buy most often?
To answer it without guesswork, we took the 100 most popular whiskies in Poland (the ones available in the largest number of shops) and, for each of them, checked which shop has the best price and which ones are right on its heels. Each shop earns points for how close to the lowest price it lands — and at the end we add it all up into a single ranking. No paid placements, no favouritism: prices are all that count.
Below you'll find the full methodology (we explain how we score the points — in simple tables) and the ranking of the 10 best shops as of 17 June 2026, along with a surprising conclusion: the biggest shop is by no means the cheapest.
How we score the points — methodology
The ranking is based on 100 whiskies available in the largest number of Polish shops — the bottles you actually compare before buying. We go through them one by one and award shops points for each. The base rule: a shop earns points for a given whisky only once (the highest it deserves).
| Shop's position on a given whisky | Points |
|---|---|
| Lowest price in Poland | 10 pts |
| Best prices (band I) | 7 pts |
| A little more expensive (band II) | 4 pts |
| Still in the game (band III) | 2 pts |
| Above the value threshold | 0 pts |
And how wide are these "bands"? Here's the crux: for cheaper bottles we allow a larger percentage deviation, for pricier ones — a smaller one. The reason is simple — 5% on a 150 PLN bottle is about 7.5 PLN, while 3% on a 600 PLN bottle is already 18 PLN. We always calculate the percentages from the lowest available price of a given whisky:
| Base price (lowest) | 7 pts — up to | 4 pts — up to | 2 pts — up to |
|---|---|---|---|
| below 200 PLN | +5% | +10% | +15% |
| 200–500 PLN | +4% | +8% | +12% |
| above 500 PLN | +3% | +6% | +9% |
Finally — instead of rewarding sheer shop size — we add a price-efficiency bonus. We compute the average number of points per available bottle (price points ÷ number of whiskies in the range). This is a measure of "pure" value, resistant to catalogue size — it surfaces shops that genuinely have the best prices, not just the most listings. The top five get:
| Efficiency rank | Bonus |
|---|---|
| 🥇 1. | +100 pts |
| 🥈 2. | +90 pts |
| 🥉 3. | +80 pts |
| 4. | +70 pts |
| 5. | +60 pts |
A note on boundaries and fairness: if several shops share the identical lowest price — they all get 10 pts. We only count active, in-stock prices, and the upper band limits are inclusive (a shop sitting exactly at +5% lands in the better, 7-point band). Only shops with at least 30 of the 100 whiskies qualify for the efficiency bonus — so a small shop with a handful of well-priced bottles can't win the lottery.
